Santino Fontana and Joanna Gleason in Stephen Karam's "Sons of the Prophet," at the Laura Pels Theater.Credit
Sara Krulwich/The New York Times

To observe that a play about extreme suffering is also explosively funny might seem absurd. But one of the many soul-piercing truths in “Sons of the Prophet,” the absolutely wonderful new comedy-drama by Stephen Karam that opened on Thursday night at the Laura Pels Theater, is that life rarely obeys the rules of dramatic consistency, or, for that matter, fair play.

“What are the odds?” is a question that reverberates darkly throughout this play, as one calamity after another befalls its hapless, good-willed, ill-starred characters. But Mr. Karam reminds us that odds matter little when it comes to the distribution of suffering in the world. Nobody is spared, of course, but no one with a glancing knowledge of current or past events would argue that it is evenly distributed. God, the fates, the indifferent universe — take your pick — may choose to sprinkle a little sadness on one man’s life while drowning his neighbor in a deluge of misfortune.

“Sons of the Prophet,” commissioned and produced by the Roundabout Theater Company, where Mr. Karam’s “Speech & Debate” was a hit in its smallest theater several seasons ago, is the first important new play of the fall season. I will be very much surprised (albeit pleasantly) if it is bettered. Written with insight and compassion, not to mention biting wit, it shines a clarifying light into some of life’s darker passages, exploring how people endure the unendurable, and not only survive but also move forward through their blighted lives with sustaining measures of hope, love and good humor. The question of why we suffer is unanswerable, but how we suffer defines our character and shapes our lives more than we care to acknowledge.

The sensitive performance of Santino Fontana, one of the most promising young actors to emerge in the New York theater in recent years (he starred in the quickly shuttered Broadway revival of Neil Simon’s “Brighton Beach Memoirs”), is the play’s trembling emotional heart. Mr. Fontana plays Joseph Douaihy, a 29-year-old man living in small-town Pennsylvania desperately trying to keep his family from falling apart even as his body is ravaged by a series of strange ailments.

Joseph is a former running champ, so the inflammation in his knees naturally seems to be the fallout from a torn ligament. But something more “global” appears to be at work, and in any case he is distracted from his dreary rounds of diagnosis-seeking when a more urgent tragedy befalls the family. Joseph’s father, a former steelworker, was driving home from his new maintenance job when he swerved to avoid a deer and crashed his car, landing in the hospital. A week later he died of a heart attack.

The deer, it turns out, was a stuffed decoy placed there by a high school student as a prank. This enrages Joseph’s older and ailing uncle, Bill (Yusef Bulos), who is even more disgusted when it is learned that the culprit is the star of the local football team, Vin (Jonathan Louis Dent), a town hero who is given a dispensation by a judge to serve his sentence in juvenile detention after the football season has concluded. Joseph and his younger brother, Charles (Chris Perfetti) — who are both gay — are more sympathetic to Vin, an African-American boy who has grown up in a foster home, and whose chance at a professional career may be jeopardized.

Gloria (Joanna Gleason), Joseph’s new boss and a book packaging expert, knows a little about career jeopardy herself. She was run out of the publishing business — and Manhattan — when she sold a memoir by a Holocaust survivor that turned out to be fictionalized. (Gloria’s story and Vin’s are inspired by actual events.)

Photo

Santino Fontana, far left, and Yusef Bulos in “Sons of the Prophet,” about a young man trying to stay afloat despite overwhelming misfortune.Credit
Sara Krulwich/The New York Times

Now she latches on to the discovery that Joseph’s family, of Lebanese extraction, is distantly related to Kahlil Gibran, author of the perennial best-selling spiritual book “The Prophet.” In her hilariously addled mind — complaining about her fall from grace, she defensively remarks, “I wasn’t at the Holocaust” — she decides that a memoir by Joseph about his family’s journey will be her ticket back to the big time.

Mr. Karam’s play, which runs a little less than two hours and is performed in one seamless act , may sound top-heavy with plot and character. (Did I mention that Gloria’s emotional frailty also stems from the suicide of her husband?) Some of the relationships would benefit from being fleshed out in greater detail: the integration of Gloria into the lives of Joseph and his family, for example. The play’s climax shoehorns all the elements of the story into a farcical scene that seems a little forced, funny though it is.

But one of Mr. Karam’s themes is the indiscriminate nature of misfortune — one calamity does not immunize you from the next, worse one — so the multiplication of disasters roiling the characters’ lives is to the point. And he writes with such precision that even the more peripheral characters emerge as sharply drawn, multifaceted individuals.

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Directed by Peter DuBois with a supple feel for both its bold humor and its understated pathos, the play affords wonderful roles for the excellent cast. Best of all is Mr. Fontana’s dazed but ever-functioning Joseph, whose tentative romance with a reporter (Charles Socarides) covering the story of Vin’s trial provides another subplot. Ms. Gleason’s distracted Gloria is a primary purveyor of the play’s comedy, with her solipsistic monologues that sound like a series of disconnected text messages.

Mr. Bulos fulminates amusingly as the cantankerous Bill, whose rock-solid Maronite faith is both a source of exasperation and, oddly, succor to his nonbelieving nephews. Mr. Perfetti is a delight as the more extroverted, sardonic Charles, who berates his brother for dressing “like a lesbian.” Mr. Dent has only a couple of scenes, but is spot on as the well-meaning Vin, who doesn’t have the language to articulate his anguish fully.

In his great poem “Musée des Beaux Arts,” W. H. Auden wrote of how suffering “takes place while someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along.” Mr. Karam’s play explores a corollary idea, that quite often the one who suffers must continue to eat and open windows and trudge along too, bearing up under the burden of pain as best he or she can. We can’t all blaze instantly into oblivion, like the poem’s Icarus.

Although “Sons of the Prophet” implicitly poses questions about the meaning and purpose of suffering — even of its spiritual value — Mr. Karam understands that for those in crisis, the brute, sometimes humiliating reality of debility and disease is a greater preoccupation than philosophizing about it. And with unerring sensitivity he finds the sweet spot at which laughing at the horrors of life and feeling compassion for those who must endure them intersect.

A version of this review appears in print on October 21, 2011, on Page C1 of the New York edition with the headline: Blighted Existences, Eased With Hope and Humor. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe